"The Road" written by Cormac McCarthy

I'm not a big fan of Oprah, and i'm even less of a fan of her book club. Pretty much anything she hawks on her show, we will undoubtedly blow through 100 or more copies at Barnes & Noble the next day. And the books she picks are usually pretty fluffy nonsense. That being said, this is her new book club pick, and having said that, i had meant to read "The Road" a week or two after it first came out due to recommednations from friends but never got around to it. So a couple weeks ago one of my coworkers, who is into some of the saem shit as me, asked me if i had read this one and went on to tell me it was just bleak beyond bleak and violent and fucked up and pretty much everything i like in a book. So i read it. And i read it fast, because no shit, this book is fucking AMAZING. It's the story of twon unnamed characters, a boy and his father, who together work their way southward across the highway after an apocalypse of some kind devastates America and turns all to ash. As well as turning most men into ghouls who enslave each other and imprison each other for cannabalistic purposes. It's a story full of violence and devastation, of ruined dreams and a past long buried by the will to survive. At the center is the relationship between father and son and how each one copes with the other as well as with the outside world and all its merauders. Cormac McCarthy is a master stylist, the books is written so beautifully and so concisely-there are passages in here that will make you want to cry but it's done with such an economy of language-it's not flowery or overbearing, it's simple, dry, to the point and gorgeous. It reminds me a lot of Bret Easton Ellis' style, but while i love BEE and his ability to say a lot with a little, Cormac McCarthy leaves him well behind. This book absolutely deserved the Pulitzer it was just awarded. I found myself picturing every image in maximum color, it was like i was watching it more than reading it-it's beyond suggestive in its illusory quality and manifestation. I badly want Werner Herzog to make a film of this.

The other thing i want to say about it is that everything here seems as though it could really happen-this is not farfetched, it's close and tangible and this is a very good guess at what an apocalypse might actually be like. I hope that i never have to go through something like this, i'm not sure if i could have the strength or resolve that either the father or the boy has in this story. A wonderful, evocative piece of literature from a true master of letters. I cannot recommend this highly enough.